Software Freedom Law Show episode 0x10

Karen and Bradley interview Carlo
Piana, a lawyer who has worked extensively in the E.U. Microsoft
Anti-Trust case.

Running time: 00:44:49.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

Karen mentioned she owned a
thinkgeek shirt that has a visual joke about number base systems. (01:13)

Bradley misspoke saying that 10 in binary would make it the
second show. Of course, it would make it the third show if we numbered in
binary, since we start numbering at zero. (01:50)

Bradley mentioned that the Software Freedom Law Show crowd sources its
marketing. (03:30)

Bradley mentioned that the US
Antitrust case against Microsoft, which included both the federal
government in the USA, and many State/Commonwealth Attorneys General, many
of which settled separately. (05:17)

Segment 1 (11:18)

Carlo mentioned that materials about the EU/Microsoft Antitrust case
takes up 4-5 square meters of his office. (14:20)

The EU case started with an ancient complaint by Sun
Microsystems. (15:10)

Carlo mentioned Novell was more dominate historically in Europe than
in the USA, and Novell had been more Unix-friendly and
compatibility-friendly. As Microsoft became dominant, Sun
complained. (15:50)

The integration of Windows Media Player into Windows was one of the
issues raised in the EU case. (16:50)

EU required Microsoft to provide timely and complete interoperability
information so that competitors can create working replacements. This made
Samba the natural client for Carlo in this
case. (17:56)

Microsoft challenged the decision, saying that it would give a
“free ride” to their competitors, (19:45) and claimed the
information wasn't necessary to achieve interoperability, because they
could just reverse engineer or implement from standards documents. (20:18)
Microsoft sited Samba as an example of how reverse engineering could work.
(20:45) Carlo called this a lame excuse. (21:10)

Carlo said that the EU entirely rejected Microsoft's
excuses. (22:46)

With the help of SFLC, Carlo was able to negotiate licensing
conditions that were GPL-compatible. This was necessary because EU
allowed RAND licensing of
the protocol information, which is often problematic for GPL-compatibility
(which typically requires RF licensing). (25:55)

The compromise required that USD$10,000 be paid by the Protocol Freedom Information
Foundation, and after that GPL-compatible licensing for the protocol
information was available generally to Samba and the entire community. (26:3)

Unfortunately, patent claims held by Microsoft are outside of the
agreement. Carlo continues to make efforts on this. (27:23)

Carlo is also working on the OOXML
issue (31:10), which Carlo says is clearly an antitrust
violation. (33:30)

In the EU third parties interested can be heard by the Commission
early in the process. (34:20)

Carlo mentioned that the participation and testimony of the Samba
team, in particular Jeremy
Allison and Andrew
Tridgell, was central to make a convincing case to the EU
court. (36:25)

Segment 2 (39:29)

Bradley believes that the most important people in the Free Software
world are doing things that no one else is willing to do. (39:40)

Karen pointed out that the international nature of Free Software means
that the success in the EU helps developers around the world. (42:30)